COMM120_FINALEXAMREVIEW

Goffman, "Performances"

Belief in the Part One is Playing: o Characters want their viewers to believe they posses the attributes they appear to have o Individuals perform to "benefit other people" o Cynical Individuals delude their audience for what they consider to be their own good, or for the good of the community o Individuals may attempt to induce the audience to judge him and the situation in a particular way, and they may seek this judgment as an ultimate end Front: o Part of the individual's performance which functions in a general and fixed fashion to define the situation for those who observe the performance o "Setting"→ refers to the scenic parts of expressive equipment o "Personal Front"→ refer to items we most intimately identify with the performer himself that we expect will follow the performer wherever he goes o Clothing, sex, age, racial characteristics, size and looks, speech o Different routines may employ the same front→ Given social front tends to become institutionalized in terms of the abstract stereotyped expectations to which it gives rise, and takes on a meaning and stability apart from the specific tasks whih happen at the time to be performed in its name. o Social front can be divided into setting, appearance, and manner o Items in the social front of a particular routine are not only found in the social fronts of a whole range of routines, but also that the whole range of routines in which one item of sign-equipment is found will differ from the range of routines in which another item in the same social front will be found. Dramatic Realization: o An individual typically infuses his activity with signs which dramatically highlight and portray confirmatory facts that may remain unapparent or obscure. o Express during the interaction what he wishes to convey Idealization: o Performance is "socialized" to fit into the understanding and expectations of the society it is presented o When an individual presents himself before others, his performance incorporates and exemplifies the accredited values of society, more in so than his behavior as a whole o Literature on Social Mobility→ Upward mobility involves the presentation of proper performances and that efforts to move upward and efforts to keep from moving downward are expressed in terms of sacrifices made for the maintenance of front. o Wealth o If the performer is to be successful, he must offer the kind of scene that realizes the obervers' extreme stereotypes o If an individual is to give expression to ideal standards during his performance, then he will have to forgo or conceal action which is inconsistent with standards o Eight-year-olds claim lack of interest in younger television shows, but watch them anyways o Performers engenders in his audience the belief that he is related to them in a more ideal way than is always the case o Audiences assume that the character projected before them is all there is to the individual who acts out the projection before them o Performers tend to foster the impression that their current performance of their routine and relationship to their current audience have something special and unique about them

Johnson, "Privilege, Oppression, and Difference"

Difference is Not the Problem: o Ignoring privilege keeps us in a state of unreality by promoting the illusion that difference by itself is the problem. o People are naturally afraid of what they don't know or understand. o The idea that everyone is naturally frightened by difference is a cultural myth. o If we feel afraid, it isn't what we don't know that frightens us, it's what we think we do know. Mapping Difference: Who are We? o Shifting only a few parts of the diversity wheel would be enough to change lives dramatically. o The trouble of diversity is produced by a world organized in ways that encourage people to use difference to include or exclude, reward or punish, credit or discredit, elevate or oppress, value or devalue, leave alone or harass. o Perceptions are hard to control, because people tend to assume they can identify characteristics such as race and gender by looking at someone. o Our culture allows for two genders, and if you don't fit in those genders... You are an outsider. The Social Construction of Difference: o "No one is white before he/she came to America," James Baldwin said. "It took generations and a vast amount of coercion, before this became a white country." o Unless you live in a culture that recognizes such differences as significant, they are socially irrelevant and therefore, in a way, do not exist. o Race and all of its categories have no significance outside systems of privilege and oppression in which they were created... This is called "social construction" of reality. o "Normal" is constructed by how people notice and label and think about bodily differences and how they treat people as a result of one's culture. • "Normal" heights • Blind people→ disability (They are automatically considered a "blind person.") o Reducing people to a single dimension of who they are seperates and excludes them, marks them as "other" as different from "normal" (THE blind, THE crippled, THE deaf) o What makes socially constructed reality so powerful is that we rarely if ever experience it as that. o But it is that once human beings give something a name-skin or disability-that thing acquires a significance it otherwise would not have. o More important, the name quickly takes on a life of its own as we forget the social process that created it and start treating it as a "real" in and of itself. o Racial classification has had little to do with objective characteristics and everything to do with preserving white power and wealth. o When the stakes are privilege and power, dominant groups are quite willing to ignore such inconsistencies so long as the result is a continuation of their privilege. What is Privilege? o Privilege→ Has become one of those loaded words we need to reclaim so that we can use it to name and illuminate the truth. o It exists when one group has something of value that is denied to others simply because of the groups they belong too, rather than because of anything they've done or failed to do. o Access to privilege doesn't determine my outcomes, but it is definitely an asset that makes it more likely that whatever talent, ability, and aspirations we have will result in something good. o The ease of not being aware of privilege is an aspect of privilege itself, what some call "the luxury of obliviousness" o "To be white in America means not having to think about it." o Privilege comes in two types: o "Unearned entitlement"→ things of value that all people SHOULD have (feeling safe in public) • "Unearned Advantage"→ when an unearned entitlement is restricted to certain groups. Gives dominant groups a competitive edge they are reluctant to even acknowledge, much less give up. o "Conferred dominance"→ gives one group power over another • Men dominating a conversation • Boy being close to his mom becomes a "mama's boy" o It is harder to do something about power and the unequal distribution of resources and rewards. What Privilege Looks Like in Everyday Life: o Whites are less likely than blacks to be arrested o Black players are held to higher standards than whites o Whites are more likely to have loan applications o Whites are charged lower prices o Whites can succeed without other people surprised o Men are held to a lower standard than women o As to gender inequality, men who work year-round and full-time earn on average 50 percent more than do comparable women. o Privilege grants the cultural authority to make judgments about others and to have those judgments stick. o To be privileged is to go through life with the relative ease of being unmarked. • • Privilege as Paradox: o The granting of privilege has nothing to do with who those individuals are as people. o Gays and lesbians can have access to heterosexual privilege so long as they don't reveal sexual orientation. o When it comes to privilege, it doesn't matter who we really are. What matters is who other people think we are, which is to say, the social categories they put us in. o Consequences from this paradox of privilege: o Privilege is rooted in societies and groups as much as it's rooted in people's personalities and how they perceive and react to one another. • Takes more than changing individuals o We don't have to be special or even feel special in order to have access to privilege o The paradoxical experience of being privileged without feeling privileged is a second consequence that privilege is more about social categories than people who are. o Whites compare themselves with other whites, not with people of color. o This means that whites tend not to feel privileged by their race when they compare themselves with their reference group. o To protect from feeling and being seen on the bottom of the ladder, they may go out of their way to compare themselves to women or people of color by emphasizing their supposed gender or racial superiority. o A corollary to being privileged without knowing it is to be on the other side of privilege without necessarily feeling that. The Paradox That Privilege Doesn't Necessarily Make You Happy: o Belonging to a privileged category improves the odds in favor of certain kinds of advantages and preferential treatment, but doesn't guarantee anything for any given individual. → Being born white won't stop your stocks from crashing in the stock market. o Privilege can exact a cost from those who have it. o The guilt comes from this and the lengths to which white people will often go to avoid feeling and looking at it. Oppression: The Flip Side of Privilege o Privilege tends to open doors of opportunities, oppression tends to slam them shut o A group can be oppressed only if there exists another group with the power to oppress them o Misapplying the label of "oppression" also tempts into the false argument that it is men and women both oppressed because of gender, the one oppression balances out the other and no privilege can be said to exist. o Society isn't something that can have privilege. Only people can do this by belonging to privileged categories in relation to other categories that aren't.

Griffin, "Symbolic Interactionism"

MEANING: THE CONTSTRUCTION OF SOCIAL REALITY o Humans act toward people or things on the basis of the meanings they assign to those people or things. o Once people define a situation as real, it is very real in its consequences LANGUAGE: THE SOURCE OF MEANING o Meaning arises out of the social interaction that people have with each other o Negotiated through the use of language o We designate a specific object (person), identify an action (scream), or refer to an abstract idea (crazy) o It is by talking with others that we come to ascribe the meaning (small, soft, loveable→ kitten) o Interactionist claim that the extent of knowing is dependent on the extent of naming... It is the way we learn the world o We have default assumptions... Surgeons being male o "Strange, weird, or deviant" referred to people who are different THOUGHT: THE PROCESS OF TAKING THE ROLE OF THE OTHER o An individual interpretation of symbols is modified by his or her own thought process o Thinking as an inner conversations... Mead called this minding. o Minding→ The pause that's reflective (two second pause to rehearse our next move) o "Humans require social stimulation and exposure to abstract symbol systems to embark upon conceptual thought processes that characterize our species" o Animals are unable to communicate symbolically o Human beings have the capacity to take the role of the other o Thought is the mental conversation we hold with others THE SELF: REFLECTIONS IN A LOOKING GLASS o The looking-glass self→ Taking the role of the other-how we look to another person (socially constructed) o Symbolic interactionist say that the self is a function of language... No talk means no self-concept o "I"→ spontaneous, driving force, unpredictable, and unorganized o "Me"→ an object (looking at us from the outside) o Formed only through symbolic interaction • COMMUNITY: THE SOCIALIZING EFFECT OF OTHERS' EXPECTATIONS o Generalized other→ organized set of information that the individual carries in their head about what the general expectation and attitudes of the social group are o How to behave in a social situation o Mead says generalized other is 1) looking-glass self that we put together from the reflections we see in everyone we know 2) the expectations of society that influence every conversation that takes place in people's minds A SAMPLER OF APPLIED SYMBOLIC INTERACTION: • Creating Reality: o Negotiation with others to define our identity and the nature of the situation • Meaning-ful Research: o Sharing in the lives of the people they study • Generalized Other: o Responses of someone that can cause them to believe that is what they are • Naming: o Names heard in public places in demeaning voices • Self-Fulfilling Prophecy: o We have a significant impact on how others view themselves o Interpersonal power

Allen, "Social Identity"

Our study of difference centers on communication. • Communicating→ Dynamic nature of processes that humans use to produce, interpret, and share meaning • Discourse→ "systems of texts and talk that range from public to private and from naturally occurring to mediated forms" • Discourse "produces, maintains, and/or resists systems of power and inequality" • Social Identity- person's self-image derived from the social categories to which an individual perceives herself/himself as belonging o Dividing into social groups, and categorizing ourselves into those groups o Distinct from personal identity, which encompasses the conception of the self in terms of variables such as personality traits Difference and Other Important Matters: • An individual can "belong" to numerous social identity groups • Six including→ o Gender o Race o Social Class o Ability o Sexuality o Age • Humans develop social identities through communicating (social constructionist) • "Our identity arises out of interactions with other people and is based on language" • Sex matters because it cues people on how to treat one another • Socialization→ receiving messages from multiple sources about what you are "allowed and supposed to do" (girls growing up) • Due to socialization, children accept social identity categories as real and natural designations. • Essentialism→ refers to assumptions that social differences stem from intrinsic, innate, human variations unrelated to social forces • Social identity groups are fixed and unchanging as well • The tendency to compartmentalize humans according to physical characteristics is logical because "labels can be helpful devises used to identify people" • Problems can arise when people assign meaning to previously neutral descriptors. o Categories to discriminate and dominate • Social Identity Theory→ describes humans' tendency to label self and others based on individual and group identity • Stereotypes and prejudice are less likely when a communicator views another person as an individual • Privilege- refers to advantage status based upon social identity o "Make life easier; to get what one wants, and to be treated in an acceptable manner" o Enables people to remain oblivious to institutional and social forces and their impact on other people • Opposing standpoints of privileged and non-privileged persons can negatively impact interactions • Most individuals simultaneously occupy privileged and non-privileged social identity groups • Constructing inequality→ Members of non-dominant groups often help to perpetuate hierarchies because they believe that their group is inferior and that the dominant group is superior • Internalized Oppression- accepting these ideas and believing negative stereotypes about one's group • Colorism- intragroup hierarchy of skin color Summary: • Social Identities are created in context; they emerge mainly from social interactions • We learn who we are and who we might become through interaction with others

Wood, "Skin Deep"

o "I want to be known as a talented young filmmaker. That should be first, but the reality today is that no matter how successful you are, you are black first." Spike Lee o Communication that highlights aspects of a person→ race, sex, sexual orientation, disability, or economic status. • Understanding the Misunderstanding: o Scholars use the term totalize to describe communication that emphasizes one aspect of a person above all others. o When someone totalizes, they act as if a single facet of an individual is the totality of that person or as if that single aspect is all that's important about the person. o Less obvious but no less important is the impact of totalizing on people who engaging in it. o We tend to perceive others through the labels we use to describe them. o Burke says that the words we use to reflect our perceptions select certain aspects of what we are describing while simultaneously deflecting, or neglecting, other aspects of what we are describing. o We may not see in others whatever our labels deflect. o We tend to be uncomfortable when we are unsure about others and situations. o A second reason we stereotype is that we rely on what psychologist call implicit personality theory. o Unspoken and unrecognized assumptions about qualities that go together in personalities. • Assume attractive people are more extroverted, intelligent, and socially skilled than less attractive Forms of totalizing: o Involves defining individuals by their membership in a specific group. o Reduces individuals to one quality or aspect of their identities. • "Disabled" or "amputee" • When someone with a disability is recognized as disabled, we highlight what they cannot do rather than all they can do... When we mark an individual as an exception to her or her group, we unknowingly reveal our own stereotypes. In fact, we may reinforce them because marking an individual who doesn't conform to the stereotype as unusual leaves our perceptions of the group unchanged.

Sunwolf, "Peer Groups"

• A hidden culture of social cruelty exists in childhood peer groups Freaks, Geeks, Jocks, and Stars: Peer Group Teasing and Bullying: • Social rankings are never invisible to us • Every minute of every day, some child is being cut down by a peer group • Sounds of silence may be signs of peer group shunning and exclusion • Few adults fully understand the peer group dynamics that sustain this social cruelty. Communicating Group Values in the Culture of Adolescent Peer Groups: • Adolescents may claim to hold social values that do not appear to match their group's behavior. Strategies that Adolescents Use to Attempt to Gain Entry to Peer Groups: • Inclusion is a behavior that the included children must choose. • Physical inclusion of children in a class group by teachers does not guarantee social inclusion Bittersweet Peer Power: The Effects of Peer Group Rejection and Exclusion: • Children who are repeatedly rejected from participation and membership in groups spend more time isolated, and have less social growth or development skills Adolescent Group Boundaries: • Group rejection decisions that are not shared by a member may trigger unexpressed stress • An outsider's anticipatory entry into groups and the negative anxiety that may accompany an attempt to gain peer group inclusion may be one source of adult grouphate • Stigma of peer group rejection may enhance anticipated group entry stress, when children believe that their rejection may seem "contagious" to other potential friends

Bishop, "Freaks and Geeks"

• Description of peer culture in this paper is based on review of ethnographic studies of adolescent peer cultures, structured and unstructured interviews conducted by the authors, and responses to survey questionnaires completed by nearly 100,000 middle school and high school students the past four years. The qualitative data reflect the memories of the paper's authors, most of whom had only recently graduated from New York State high schools in 2003, and taped interviews of 10th graders in eight secondary schools serving predominantly White, upper-middle class suburbs in New York State conducted during winter 1998.

Tracy, "Becoming a Character"

• Since Hochschild's (1983) groundbreaking study of Delta flight attendants, scholars have been intrigued with issues of emotion labor, a type of work wherein employees are paid to create a "pack- age" of emotions. o On a cruise ship, employee emotion is not just a response to work situations but actually is the work. • In studying emotion labor on a cruise ship, pressures from both home and work can be analyzed in tandem, offering a richer understanding of how the two relate to each other. Such an analysis also provides implications for other total institutions, such as military units, prisons, and asylums. • Emotions have typically been regarded as feminine, private, and irrational and thus are largely written out of the public, masculine world of work (Fineman, 1993, 1996). • A social constructionist approach encourages an understanding of emotion as constructed by and managed within the constraints of interaction, communication, and local social norms (Armon-Jones, 1986; Averill, 1994; Harré, 1986; Oatley, 1993). • A social constructionist perspective that is particularly helpful for understanding emotion in organizations is Goffman's (1963/ 1980) dramaturgical approach. • According to Hochschild (1983), nothing is inherently wrong with emotion management or the effort people expend on making sure that their private feelings are expressed in a way that is consistent with social norms or expectations. • Hochschild (1983) detailed a number of potential problems with emotion labor, but her main concern was that it caused "estrange- ment between what a person senses as her 'true self' and her inner and outer acting" (p. 136). • Emotions are considered more real in private life before they fall under the sway of organizational norms. • The study of emotion within organizations demands an under- standing of the extent to which "real" emotion is formed through interaction, dialogue, and societal and organizational rules. • First, Foucault (1982b) offers an understanding of the arbitrary and historical nature of institutional structures that come to be seen as normal, natural, and incontestable. Foucault demonstrates how arbitrary forms of reason have been subjectively constructed and made feasible and how rules and laws are historically contingent rather than rationally or objectively necessary. • Second, Foucault's (1980b, 1982b) conception of power offers a fresh way of understanding emotion labor norms. He rejects the traditional conceptualization of power as a commodity or top-down structure. • Last, Foucault (1977, 1980a, 1982a, 1988) takes the social con- struction hypothesis one step further. From a postmodern point of view, identity is overdetermined (Holmer-Nadesan, 1996; Laclau, 1990; Laclau & Mouffe, 1985); is the product of multiple, contradictory discourses (Hall, 1985); and consists of myriad subindividuals (Foucault, 1980a). o Discourse transmits and produces power, which in turn continuously produces and constitutes the self (Foucault, 1977, 1982a). • The goal of this project was to provide a picture of emotion labor and burnout in a total institution and problematize several long-standing assumptions about emotion labor. • Foucauldian theory poses three central challenges and/or extensions to the current emotion labor literature. First, emotion theorists can contextualize studies and denaturalize long-standing assumptions about emotion labor by historicizing emotional control mechanisms. o By under- standing how emotion rules and expectations are historically contingent, we begin to deconstruct the power structures that normalize organizational life. • Second, emotion labor control systems were dispersed among myriad sources including obtrusive supervisory organizational programs, the tourist or customer gaze, peers, and self-control mechanisms. • Third, this study raises questions about the dichotomous portrayal of a real self and a fake performance, a distinction past researchers have used to explain the discomfort associated with emotion labor. • As illustrated in the case of the cruise staff, individuals within total institutions tend to construct a single dominant discourse that essentially blankets dialogue and suffocates conflict. • Foucauldian theory tells us that "real" identity is produced and constrained through disciplinary forces and organizational norms.

Becker, "Outsiders"

• Social rules define situations and the kinds of behavior appropriate to them, specifying some actions as "right" and forbidding others as "wrong." • An outsider→ one who cannot be trusted to live by the rules agreed on by the group o The rule breaker may feel his judges are outsiders • Rules→ formally enacted into law o Represent informal agreements o Task of some specialized body o May be everyone's job to enforce it • Informal Rules→ die from lack of enforcements • Some deviants develop full-blown ideologies explaining why they are right and why those who disapprove of and punish them are wrong Definitions of Deviance: • Deviant acts occur because some characteristic of the person who commits it makes it necessary or inevitable that he should • They accept the values of the group making the judgment • If scientist ignore the process of judgment, they may by that omission limit kinds of theories that can be developed and the kind of understanding that can be achieved • The simplest view of deviance is essentially statistical, defining as deviant anything that varies too widely from the average o Something essentially pathological (disease) • The medical metaphor limits what we can see much as the statistical view does o Model of deviance based on the medical notions of health and disease o They discriminate between those features of society which promote stability (functional) and those that disrupt stability (dysfunctional) • The functional view of deviance limits our understanding • Relativistic View→ identifies deviance as the failure to obey group rules o Person may break the rules of one group by the very act of abiding by the rules of another group o Ambiguity Deviance and the Response of Others: • Central fact about deviance: it is created by society • Social groups create deviance by making the rules whose in-fraction constitutes deviance, and by applying those rules to particular people and labeling them as outsiders o Consequence of the application by others of rules and sanctions to an "offender" • Personal and social characteristics of deviance→ which they come to be thought of as outsiders and their reactions to that judgment • Whether an act is deviant, depends on how other people react to it • Deviants have variation over time • Deviant acts depends on who commits the act and who feels he has been harmed by it • Some rules are enforced only when they result in certain consequences o Unmarried mother o Deviance is the product of a process which involves responses of other people to the behavior • We do not know whether an act is deviant until the response of others has occurred.. It lies in the interaction between the person who commits an act and those who respond to it Whose Rules? • "Outsiders"→ person who is labeled deviant... guilty of rule breaking • Rules are the creation of specific social groups o Variation in people's attitudes o Perspectives of the people who engage in the behavior are likely to be quite different from those of the people who condemn • Only those who are actually members of the group have any interest in making and enforcing certain rules • Members of a group consider it important to their welfare that members of certain other groups obey certain rules • Who can force others to accept their rules and what are the causes of their success? o Political and economic power o People are always forcing their rules on others (young people, women, race) • Rules created and maintained by labeling are not universally agreed to

Lorde, "The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action"

• What the author regretted most were her silences prior to the protests • Began to recognize a sense of power that came from knowledge and not being afraid; putting fear into a perspective and gaining strength • Author is a black, lesbian, woman • Transformation of silence into language and action is an act of self-revelation, that always seems fraught with danger • In the cause of silence, we draw the face of our own fear... fear of contempt, of censure, or some judgment, or recognition, of challenge, of annihilation o We fear the visibility without which we cannot truly live • Racial difference offers a distortion of vision • We are never meant to survive... The visibility that makes us most vulnerable is that which also is the source of our greatest strength • Each one of us is here because in one way or another we share a commitment to language which has been made to work against us o Each one of us to examine our function in that transformation and to recognize the role vital within that transformation • It is necessary to teach by living and speaking those truths which we believe and know beyond understanding • We must recognize our responsibility to seek words out, to read them and share them and examine them in their pertinence to lives • We can learn to work and speak when we are afraid in the same way we have learned to work and speak when we are tired • We have been socialized to respect fear for more than our own needs for language and definition, the weight of that silence will choke us